How Was Matera Built

The distinctive thing about Matera is that most of it was removed rather than assembled.

Dug, not built

A Sasso house typically begins as a chamber cut horizontally into the slope. The excavated calcarenite blocks are then used to build a facade across the opening, sometimes with further rooms in front. Over generations houses grew forward and upward, so what looks like a street of buildings is often a street of front walls with caves behind them — and the roof of one house is the terrace, or the lane, of the one above.

The cisterns underneath

Under almost every house is a bell-shaped cistern cut into the rock and lined with cocciopesto, a waterproof plaster of lime and crushed pottery. Roofs, terraces and lanes were all shaped to channel rain into them. The Palombaro Lungo beneath Piazza Vittorio Veneto is the extreme case: a cathedral-sized reservoir fifteen metres deep, only rediscovered in the 1990s.

Rock churches

The same technique produced the churches: naves, aisles, apses, domes and carved columns all cut out of solid rock in imitation of built architecture, then plastered and frescoed. They are architecture as sculpture, reproducing structures that here carry no load at all.

The vicinato

Cave houses were grouped around a shared open courtyard, the vicinato, with a common cistern and oven at its centre. It was the basic social unit of the Sassi as well as the basic building unit, and it is still legible: a doorway off a lane opens into a yard with six or eight front doors around it.

The Civita and the Piano

The spur between the two Sassi carries the thirteenth-century cathedral, conventionally built in Apulian Romanesque. Behind it the Piano, the town on level ground, is ordinary masonry — the part of Matera that was built the usual way.